


The Wild Swans

by Dr_Fell



Category: De vilde Svaner | The Wild Swans - Hans Christian Andersen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-12-24
Updated: 2015-12-23
Packaged: 2018-05-08 20:29:49
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 768
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5512118
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Dr_Fell/pseuds/Dr_Fell





	1. Chapter 1

The boy was now a swan.

His chin was transformed into a beak, his hands to wings. 

Again and again, he reached out for something, and a white wing unfurled before him. 

He screamed, and a hiss came out of his mouth. His neck went snaking back, too long, too long, and his head dizzied with it. The screaming in his head overtook the hissing in his ears, and for a while he lost consciousness.

When he woke, he was still a swan.

He was a swan the next day, too.

And again, and again. 

Every morning, there was a moment, a precious moment, just one or two seconds long, while everything seemed well. And then there was a sense of dread, unfocused and unpurposed, simply the knowledge that something terrible, something unspecified, had happened. Was about to happen. And then the memory and the despair began again for the day.

He didn't know what a swan ate, even. He hated himself for his own stupidity. Was it frogs? Or pondweed? Or fish? 

No animal instinct told him. He was merely a boy in the body of a swan. He drank the river water, shivered by the bank at night.

As he waited, he tried duckweed, but it made him sick. He was losing weight, he could feel it. And he was so cold, so cold. Even in the sun he was cold. Wrapped in feathers, and none could warm him up. 

He couldn't fly either. Didn't know how to fly. The wings were there, but what did he do with them?

One morning, he made himself stretch out those stupid wings, made himself flap his arms up and down. The wings beat, but nothing happened. He ran forwards, waving his arms up and down, and nothing happened. He was a swan who couldn't fly. 

There seemed to be no reason for it, no reason for being a swan. By the river bank, under a bush, he thought obsessively about what had sent him here. Had he missed something? 

It was his fault, perhaps. Had he done something? Not done something? A curse at his christening? An evil witch? A bad fairy? 

If he was a princess, he thought, a prince would come and rescue him. As it was... 

Eventually, he set off, walking along the river bank on those broad splayed orange feet that still threatened to trip him up. He would find a princess and kiss her. That would save him.


	2. Chapter 2

She makes the shirts white and pale and soft. 

The shirts are pale, and her hands are stung red raw. There's no blood, but an aching heat as though someone has thrust her hands into coals. It reaches up her hands, beats against her wrists and arms. 

Her body is cold, and her feet so cold, so cold. But her hands and arms burn red with blood. It must be drawing all the blood up from her feet, to send it running warm against her skin.

She must make 12 shirts, big enough for swans to put on. How big is a swan? She can't tell, they won't let her get close.

She picks the nettles, pulls the leaves off, holds one end of the nettle stem and beats it again and again against the stones until the fibres come out clean. 

Sometimes she'd like to turn her skin inside out to take off the horrible itching. She wonders how much her brothers itch, with the feathers coating their bodies and arms. She wonders if they're cold too, or if the feathers are warm enough.

She looks at them, as the flock sweeps across the lake, and she sees the strength of it. The strength of their wings, arched back for landing, their feet outstretched, a moment's elongation, and then they hit their reflections and the bird and reflection come together into one double bird. 

Later, she envies the strength of the outstretched wings. It changed them all, she thinks. They came back with a sense of power, a gift of flight. Forever after, they have seen the woods from above, they have out-flown the wind, they have slept out among storms and snow and heat. No wonder that, princes once more, they set up businesses, they go into politics, they take part in the Olympics. 

Her experience was one of drudgery and pain. She saved them all, through long hours crouched in the woods, though the cold endurance of pain and through setting her mind past it. And yet, when it comes to it, she has lost all power, though she was the heroine.


End file.
